1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to electronic documents, and more particularly to an electronic document for mortgage transactions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Information is being increasingly processed electronically in lieu of traditional paper processes. Electronic documents offer substantial benefits, such as cost reduction and the accommodation of rapid manipulation and organization of information. In addition to providing new benefits, electronic documents should be designed to at least provide the same level of usefulness as conventional paper documents. Specifically, laws and business customs variously address paper document concerns including authenticity (that a document is what it purports to be and has been actually signed by the appropriate entities), integrity (that a document is complete and unaltered), and validity (that a document complies with business and legal rules), and electronic documents should equal or exceed the level to which traditional paper document practices satisfy these concerns.
Although conventional electronic documents address some of the traditional paper document concerns, they remain problematic in several respects. One problem with electronic documents is that, although they are capable of being rapidly processed, they must still integrate with environments in which their content will need to be accurately and verifiably displayed (e.g., printed, rendered on a monitor, etc.). This is particularly true for mortgage transactions, where documents such as promissory notes are still routinely used in paper form during certain procedures, such as closings. Although the data contained on a printed document could be transferred to an electronic document, in many applications such an electronic document could not be properly validated due to the lack of adequate assurances that the data contained in the electronic document actually corresponds to the printed (or otherwise viewed) document used in an underlying transaction. The printed document could be manually compared to the data in the electronic document in order to validate the electronic document, but such a practice would negate many of the benefits of electronic processing. Alternatively, a conventional markup language could be used to define an electronic document having displayable information. However, in such a case the listing for rendering a display would contain a substantial amount of information not required for subsequent data processing. Moreover, the format of the listing might not be amenable to rapid and accurate processing in many circumstances, and might not be formatted for related transactions.
Another problem with electronic documents is the potential for document variation within an industry, as dictated by individual practices, or by the various conditions in which an electronic document might be processed. For example, in mortgage transactions, certain lenders may have a common set of requirements for document validity, but might supplement these with their own particular requirements. A conventional electronic document (e.g., an XML document) can have a specification, such as a document type definition (DTD) that identifies constraints used to determine whether the document is valid, such as whether it contains tags that are not permitted by the DTD. However, while checking for a set of known elements is known, such validation would be inadequate where divergent document requirements are encountered. Specifically, a document may be valid according to a DTD, but invalid according to the format and content required by a particular lender.
Still further, related transactions might use separate documents that contain some common information, but which are not necessarily identical. For example, in the real estate environment, multiple documents might contain overlapping data that should be consistently defined and conveyed throughout the various documents. Neither conventional paper documents nor conventional electronic documents adequately address these concerns, as there are often discrepancies between forms purportedly having identical overlapping information.
Thus, what is needed are electronic documents that accommodate verification that data to be processed corresponds to that on viewed documents, that allow data to be displayed according to consumer preferences, and that accommodate potentially divergent document and data requirements within an industry.